54 national geographic • february 2018
POACHERS
WATCHING In total darkness, a frame from a thermal imaging camera (above) shows rangers in
Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve chasing a poacher, who was soon caught. The
devices, provided by the World Wildlife Fund to the Mara Conservancy, have allowed
rangers (top right) to extend their work protecting wildlife into the night. By day,
rangers rescue a male elephant calf (bottom right) that was separated from its herd
and thus vulnerable to predators. The elephant was flown to an animal sanctuary.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: PETE MULLER (TWO); WWF/MARA CONSERVANCY
ultimate London selfie. I ducked and turned and
apologized before realizing it was futile. And these
were just the cameras in front of my face. Were all
of my movements being casually documented in
this way? Did it really make any difference wheth-
er Big Brother was watching, given that everyone
is already watching everyone else?
I’d been discussing society’s growing pics-or-it-
didn’t-happen fixation with two keen observers.
The first, Chloe Combi, is a former schoolteach-
er whose first book, Generation Z: Their Voices,
Their Lives, is the fruit of hundreds of hours of
interviews she conducted with British teenagers.
They demonstrated a remarkable nonchalance
about being photographed and filmed in almost
every conceivable setting. “ You can watch a docu-
mentary of someone’s entire life on their phone,”
Combi told me. “ We live in a world where, in-
creasingly, nothing remains secret. And one of
the signs of true wealth and power may end up
being that privacy will become a commodity only
for those who have the serious money to buy it.
For everybody else, all the world really will be a
stage, with all the people on it self-consciously
playing their role.”
The futurist spectacle conjured up by Combi—
one in which everyone is simultaneously voyeur
and exhibitionist, 24/7—struck me as a somewhat
egalitarian version of 1984 and Brave New World,
yet no less dystopic. Are we already there, at the
POACHER
RANGER